Kid one discovering photography at Kew GardensI'm going to start writing online more. To aid this, I'm going to try writing Weeknotes. This is broadly inspired by Russell Davies, Matt Ballantine, Neil Perkin and a host of others who have kept them for years. Here goes:
- This week I've been deck building ahead of a session I'm running at Salesforce World Tour London next week. We've been investigating consumer attitudes to AI in financial services. Lots of interesting, and some surprising, findings.
- I used Einstein on Slack (Salesforce's nice and safe and trusted LLM ) to help synthesise some open-ended survey responses and it did very well. I'd say it saved me an hour of work.
- Creating videos from the depth interviews I ran was a very human process. This was fine for the fun, grab-your-attention teaser video where I can use judgement and taste to create something that sets the right mood. But to go back through eight hours of video, finding the right snippets, editing them together, balancing the audio, getting the video dimensions the same etc. was tedious even with my very streamlined process and I would gladly outsource to an AI. (Please let me know if someone has a tool for this!)
- I attended Nick Drage's Uncertainty Project session on Gaming in Business. An hour on why we should all do more war gaming. It linked to this piece on Lux Capital's Riskgaming initiative. I liked Nick's line that we should use gaming whenever we want to see the consequences of a decision. (And his other one that 'The map is the bits of the territory that matter.') I can't tell if it's just my LinkedIn, but it feels like there is a lot of energy around Futures and scenario planning at the moment.
- The topic this week in my Behaviour Change MSc is on how we evaluate the success of behaviour change interventions and hammers home that it isn't enough to understand whether it worked or not, but also how it worked or didn't and why. There's lots to take from this into other areas of measurement like team goal setting (OK they hit their target but how and why?). Context is everything, as highlighted by this article critiquing a paper claiming to pin point the best targets for behaviour change interventions.
- I bought my first 'super shoes', a pair of New Balance Supercomp Pacers. I mention it because I needed some new shoes for shorter distance racing having had a couple of years largely off because of plantar fasciitis and two things struck me: First, because running longer is trendy (marathons and ultras are where it's at) it's harder to get race shoes for shorter distances. Second, the brands and shoe stores online are pretty terrible at helping you find shoes for specific purposes. New Balance discontinued the 1400 (the last short distance racing shoe I used), but I only figured out what replaced it from Reddit and reviews. I suspect the two are linked. Race shoes = marathon shoes for most people, perhaps. But I can't be that much of an edge case, can I?
- I re-read 20 Things I've Learned as a Systems (Over)Thinker and it resonated even more than it did the first time.